Big Data Beard

It’s here!! Day 10 of 10 of our Virtual Race to .conf20 #VR2C! Today we chat about the Splunk Trust with Ryan Plas, Splunk Trust MVP. Ryan shares what it takes to earn one of the mythical Fez’s, and how to become a member of the Splunk Trust. He also shares some of his favorite tools and ways to engage with other Splunk users & partners. Love the Splunk community? Give this episode a listen. Full shownotes here

We are on day 9 of 10 of the Virtual Race to .conf20, #VR2C! We sat down with Jac Noel – Security Solutions Architect in Intel IT Information Security, & Merritte Stidston – Technical Solution Specialist in Intel’s data platforms sales group. We hear how Intel is using Splunk internally, as well as their partnership with architectures based on the latest Intel technology. Jax and Merritte share how Intel is catching the bad guys with Splunk and how Intel is working with Splunk to optimize Splunk for their customers. We also learn what key metrics customers are looking for with Splunk performance. Full shownotes here

We are on day 8 of or Virtual Race to .conf20 #VR2C. Today we hear about Karthik Rau, VP of Observability at Splunk. First we get a quick overview of what is observability and how Splunk is contributing to OpenTelemetry. Karhik also shares some of the standards needed for building a strong practice. To finish, we hear about how Splunk earned it’s spot in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for APM through it’s acquisition of SignalFX, Omnition and contributions to OpenTelemetry. Full shownotes here

It’s day 7 of our Virtual Race to .conf20! #VR2C Today we chat with Brian Clarke – Security SME, Design Engineering for Red River Technology. Brian shares his history of ethical hacking, and tells us of some of the security challenges organizations are facing today. We also learn how Red River uses Splunk to help solve IOT and security problems for a number of their customers in the federal space. Brian also shares what he’s excited for at .conf20 and what to be on the lookout for! Full shownotes here

We are at Daytona for day 6 of our Virtual Race to .conf20, #VR2C! Today we meet Joshua Parrish who is a Principal Field Applications Engineer for Arrow Electronics. Joshua shares around one of the coolest projects ever, the SAM (semi-autonomous mobility) car. We learn about the history of the project, and how it’s given drivers the ability to race again. Joshua also shares about the technical process of undertaking a project like this, and some of the design principles required for safe operation. Full shownotes here

Welcome to day five of our Virtual Race to .conf20 #VR2C! Our guests today are Jaynene Hapanowicz – CTO of Dell Digital, & Will Hudson – VP, IT for Dell Digital. We hear a bit around how Dell quickly implemented their work from home policy this year during the pandemic. Jaynene and Will also share a bit around Spunk and Observability are impacting them as they transition from a reactive to proactive IT environment. Full shownotes here

Join us on our fourth day of our virtual race to .conf20! #VR2C as we chat with Albert Biketi, VP of Security Business at Splunk. Albert shows us how businesses are going through a digital transformation and how we must change our security posture to adapt in this new digital world. We also hear about future trends of AI / ML as it relates to security with Splunk and learn a bit about some F1 trivia as well! Join in on the fun here. Full shownotes here

Today on our Virtual Race to .conf20 #VR2C, we are at Silverstone! Dan McEwen Head of Partnerships at McLaren Racing and James Hodge, Chief Technical Advisor at Splunk join us and share insights around the McLaren and Splunk partnership. We learn about McLaren’s e-sports program, Veloce. Dan also shares what McLaren has learned through virtual racing and how James and team at Splunk have been able to quickly provide views into multiple data sources for real time insights in racing. Full shownotes here

While we race at Laguna Seca on the #VR2C today, we chat with Kia Behnia, VP of IT Operations at Splunk. We learn how Splunk’s AIOps capabilities enable teams to provide 360 degree insights into your data. Kia shares how the networks landscape has change as we have transitioned to WFH this year. We also learn how AIOps is being applied to citical applications like SAP. Full shownotes here

Hear about the partners that are powering Splunk’s Virtual Race to .conf20. #VR2C Today we meet Amin Murad – Customer Solutions Architect at Red River Technologies. Amid shares how Red River helps customers use Splunk to answer their data analytics and IOT strategy. We also hear what’s next for the Splunk and Red River partnership, as well as what trends he’s excited about in the analytics space. Full shownotes here

We've talked a lot about the application and use cases around Artificial Intelligence but we have not really gone into the infrastructure that is powering this awesome technology. In the season 7 finally of the Big Data Beard Podcast, Brett sits down with Nvidia's Chris Milroy to dig into the technologies that are powering AI today. Chris, a senior data scientist in Nvidia's public sector, talks about GPUs both past and present and their impact on the evolution of AI. Its not just about GPUs however, Chris talks about the various hardware and software components, their impact on AI and Nvidia's strategy around integrating these components. With Nvidia's recent ARM acquisition, Chris gives a brief insight into why he is excited and how Nvidia is not just a GPU company. Just because season 7 is in the books doesn't mean the Big Data Beard team is going to be sitting on the beach having a drink. On October 10th, we are starting the Virtual Race 2 .conf with a daily virtual race video and podcast. Make sure you check out all the excitement and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don't miss any of the fun.

Join Cory Minton as he chats with Kyle Prins & Dean Jackson around their newest development, The Redfish Add-on for Splunk! We dive into the history of Redfish, why open standards are important, and how to get started with redfish. We also discuss the use cases of monitoring your servers via the new api and what valuable use cases you'll have for it. To finish we discuss our experience with Splunk Add-on Builder and the next steps for our add-on. Full notes here.

Today Cory and Kyle sit down with GAI President, Jay Lambke, and CTO Prem Jadwhani. GAI, or Government Acquisitions, is a Federal ISO-certified VAR focused on empowering Federal missions with cutting-edge research and development. Jay and Prem also discuss how the Federa is adopting machine learning and they can use the "3 pillars of AI" to achieve success. We also hear how laws being passed recently affect those technologies. Jay and Prem also share some of the challenges that the government can face with artificial intelligence; like how to scale and secure these complex platforms. Full shownotes can be found here.

One year ago, the Big Data Beard Team set out on the most epic roadtrip on the #IOTRV. We learned a lot about Splunk, IOT data, and living in an RV. However, this year threw us a curveball. So we decided to make our epic roadtrip even more awesome! With Splunk .conf20 being virtual (as have most of the professional racing series), the Big Data Beard team decided to race ourselves (virtually) to .conf20! Come listen to our wild idea and some of the excitement around our Virtual Race 2 .Conf20. You’ll hear a bit around the idea, the setups, and the projections as we share our excitement, as well as a bit of trash talking as we prep for the #VR2C20 starting on Oct 10! Full shownotes can be found here. Be sure to bookmark our Race page for all the latest news and info

In this week’s podcast, Cory Minton sits down with returning guest Matt Cowell, CEO of Quanthub, to hear about some of the innovation and changes that have been taking place at Quanthub over the past year. Quanthub, whose mission is to enable organizations to build great capabilities in data from data engineering to data science and advanced analytics provides skills assessments and a development platform to help organizations hire with confidence and for individuals to showcase and grow their skills. Cory and Matt explore the state of data literacy and its impact in today’s analytical world. Interested in taking Quanthub for a spin? Click here to demo this awesome product for yourself! Shownotes can be found here

We're back for season 7! We hope you've all been safe and well. As for us, we've been social distancing, masking up, and balming our beards here. Oh! And we've been upgrading our smart homes! Since we haven't shared much, we thought we'd do that for today's episode. Today, Brett and Kyle are chatting with THE smart home guru, Dean Jackson! Dean's going to share his setup on his smart home, solar panels, smart doorbells, home data centre, and smart pool! We also hear about what Brett's learned setting up his smart home, as well as some tips and tricks to help you get started as well.Full shownotes here.

You’ve heard Cory Minton talk about his love of cars a lot on the Big Data Beard podcast, and in this episode he is joined by two fellow automotive enthusiasts, Andrew Raines and Austin Gurley, who founded Apex Pro. Building on their experiences in FSAE while attending Auburn University, these two used their unique combination of skills….Austin as a talented engineer and Andrew as an professional racing driver, to create a device that would give drivers like Cory real-time feedback on the track about the performance capabilities of their vehicle. Listen in to hear how this start-up in Birmingham has transformed data acquisition for drivers to real-time feedback powered by IoT and machine learning. Be sure to listen all the way to the end as Andrew shares his top tips for amateurs to improve their performance based on not only his experience, but the massive amounts of data they now have in hand. If you are interested in getting one of these awesome devices yourself, head over to https://apextrackcoach.com/shop/. Music from this episode is by Andrew Belle.

The Big Data Beard Podcast is back! To kick off our first episode of season 6, Cory Minton sits down with Amy Tenanes, Product Marketing Manager at Dell Technologies and Flavio Junquiera, Senior Distinguished Engineer at Dell Technologies to talk about all things streaming. In today's modern analytics world, streaming data is critical component that allows organizations to get the real-time insights to drive business decisions. Streams however provide challenges to traditional analytics platforms. Amy and Flavio dive into these challenges and introduce Pravega, an Apache open-source project that provides a new storage abstraction for continuous and unbounded data. The team discusses how Pravega solves unique challenges, how it compares to other open-source projects and how organizations are using Pravega today. Amy and Flavio also share how Dell Technologies has incorporated Pravega into Dell's Streaming Data Platform, a new solution designed specifically to help organization easily and quickly get value out of their data streams. Want to enter for a chance to win a free copy of Streaming Systems by Tyler Akidau? Click here to get your hands on Pravega and check it out for yourself. To enter for a chance to win, tweet your experience with Pravega to @PravegaIO!

2019 has been a wild ride for the Big Data Beard podcast with a ton of great shows, all culminating in Season 5 and the epic Road Trip to Splunk .conf. During this episode, the team shares stories from the road, hard lessons learned in building the IOT RV and discuss the key takeaways from all of the incredible conversations we had in 2019. And with the holidays just around the corner, we talk about the tinkering we have planned for the holiday season and why Erin is considering crafting a raft to cross the Caribbean. This will be the last episode of Season 5 of the podcast and the last one for 2019...but this is not the end. While we are going to have some changes to publishing schedules in 2020, we want your feedback on what you want to hear from the Big Data Beard podcast. Comment below or on Twitter and guide us on our search in 2020 for the most interesting and inspiring use cases of AI and Big Data changing our world!

This week's podcast, we meet with Dave Normandeau, VP Global Technology Alliances and Business Development from Syncsort. And Dave Hodgson, Chief Product Officer, from Syncsort. We review their 51 year old business and how they built the company around innovative data management products. Syncsort are specialists in moving data from the legacy platforms, like mainframes, to all the next gen platforms, like Splunk. We discuss use cases, the data types, and their Ironstream product which is available in a free and paid version.